Many communication applications require specific levels of support from their network carriers. Required support parameters can include, for example, minimum bandwidth, maximum latency, and reliability of data-packet delivery. These support parameters are generally called quality-of-service (“QoS”) parameters or network-policy parameters. Some networks can issue network-policy parameter guarantees for their ability to support specific traffic requirements. Network-policy parameter guarantees are implemented in a network by allocating scarce resources to application traffic in a manner that meets the applications' support requirements. For example, a congested network element queues the traffic of applications that are tolerant of latency while transmitting latency-sensitive traffic without delay. When the congestion clears, the queued traffic is sent.
Most applications can benefit from negotiating to reserve network resources and from securing network-policy parameter guarantees when they start up. Some applications, however, are “session unaware,” that is, they were not developed with the ability to negotiate for network resources, even though their performance would benefit from a guaranteed level of service.
A session-unaware application running on a mobile device may provide unacceptable performance. Simply preventing such an application from running on the mobile device, however, may also be unacceptable.